Object Lessons

“This book is as incisive in its articulation of the stakes involved in post–Civil Rights academic field formations as it is responsive to the affective investments shaping specific fields' modes of self-governance and self-reinvention. What do we want from identity knowledges—and what do they offer us? In the incongruent spaces opened up by these questions, and against the nonsynchronized discourses marked by political obligations, institutional structures, and methodological ambitions, Robyn Wiegman narrates what she calls object lessons with inimitable intensity, agility, and imagination. If visionary thinking about identity studies is an art, she has given us a brilliant master-class performance.”—Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

“This brilliant, commodious book gives us a name for that fast-moving conceptual traffic arrayed across the academic galaxy from the 1970s to the present; as a strategy for naming, Object Lessons brings about ‘identity knowledges’ as a rethought object of desire and destination, its political commitments pursued to the bone, in the immediacy of its institutional arrangements. The reader will not want to miss Robyn Wiegman in this quite stunning and masterful outcome.”—Hortense Spillers

“This is a contentious book, but without contention, knowledges become rigid and fortified. Robyn Wiegman induces us to think more carefully about the ways in which politically committed knowledges make themselves as they make knowledge of their objects of investigation.”—Elizabeth Grosz, author of Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art

“The lesson that emerges from [Wiegman’s] argument resounds forcefully throughout Object Lessons as a whole. It teaches that whether in creating fields of scholarly practice or in the theorization of objects of knowledge, the institutional formation of identity knowledges is inescapably attached to what these knowledges critique and thereby attempt to leave behind. Identity knowledges, in other words, appear in Object Lessons as moored to and made in the very gestures of disavowal,”

“Object Lessons by Robyn Wiegman is a profoundly pedagogic book. By which I mean: it is a book that teaches us how we are taught. . . . The book prompted me to reflect on my own relation to Women’s Studies even if I did not always recognise the version of Women’s Studies being presented (and we do not need to recognise each other’s versions to know they bear some relation).”

“[Wiegman’s] book left me reeling in the best possible way, precisely because it focuses in on the affective life of our critical impulses. Wiegman peels back the veneer on our investments in a variety of politics — feminist, anti-racist, imperialist, queer— leaving us to confront why we show up to struggle with our work. This book gave me the gift of recognizing conflict and incommensurability as powerful sites from which to continue to passionately invest in politics.”

“Object Lessons is an excellent contribution to the field of critical scholarship... Recommended for scholars and graduate students working in the areas of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, particularly, as well as other identity-based disciplines. Wiegman is a brilliant thinker and her text provides a site for considering the stakes of the projects with which we’re engaged and how the “stakes” are defined in the first place.While Wiegman offers no easy answers, for scholars who have ever asked questions of themselves, like: “Does my work do anything?” and “Does this work really matter?” what Wiegman does offer is a thoughtful meditation on the narratives that work to sustain the aspirational hopes of disciplines emerging out of left critique; specifically, the hope that critical practices will deliver the futures of which we dream.”

“In addition to engaging identity studies’ practitioners, Object Lessons effectively addresses students being disciplined in interdisciplines and schooled in the tradition of oppositional positions: all those, in other words, for whom the limits, possibilities, and pleasures of academic labor are inextricably bound to the questions of the legibility and precarity of their institutional homes.”

“In Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman considers how the political imaginary of the feminist alternative functions. She explores our attachments to feminism’s objects, quite brilliantly showing how we – as feminists – invest in theory and critique’s ability to transform the world. I am not entirely sure how she manages it, but Wiegman combines uncomfortable insights about, for example, our desires for the concept and practice of ‘intersectionality’ to deliver us from the burden of ongoing racism and injustice, with a generosity that invites the reader in and keeps her reading.”

"An extraordinary work of critical theory within academic identity knowledges, and deserves to be numbered among the best works of contemporary feminist and queer theory."

"Masterfully cover[s] a wide range of theoretical material, from the complex intercalation of women’s studies with gender studies, through the fraught relation of queer studies to conceptions of 'normativity' (306), and the equally fractious question of how the discourse of

internationalization has played out within the 'field imaginary' (14) of American studies. . . . Object Lessons is an important book, shrewd both in its critique and its awareness of the limitations of critique."